Ep 093: Waffle Cakes
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This week, the topic is: "effective composition." We search for that sweet spot between full-featured mixes and simple ingredients when crafting your software recipes.
Our discussion includes:
- What makes code "composable"? What makes it "not composable"?
- What baking has in common with software design.
- What baking does not have in common with software design.
- Are you using ingredients or a box mix?
- How to know when you need to split something apart.
- When is a part too big? When is a part too small?
- What is too flexible?
- The principle of orthogonality.
- Decomposing without the smell.
Selected quotes:
- "This is a Clojure podcast. We have to have a definition every once in a while."
- "When you try to take code that someone has made and combine it with other things, how much resistance, how much difficulty, do you begin to encounter?"
- "A cake is a composition of smaller things."
- "You're still composing a cake. You're just composing it out of bigger things."
- "Let's compose dinner together."
- "You might be fighting against some of the ingredients, because you have a whole lot of stuff that's been premixed that comes along for the ride."
- "What if you want waffles?"
- "Everything is made of atoms! If I could assemble atoms, I have ultimate flexibility!"
- "If it's narrowly focused, it's hard for it to get in the way of other things."
- "You're making well-suited things, that have small scopes of responsibility, so that you can weave them together appropriately for your domain."
- "Who owns the recipe?"
- "Ah yes, you are the cause and the solution of the problem!"
- "Are you able to write a new recipe and reuse all the ingredients?"
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